How to Get Motivated About Things You Don't Want to Do | Dr. Adam Grant & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | When I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about,
00:00:06.600 | some more than others, of course.
00:00:08.680 | But occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that, frankly, I had minimal
00:00:14.600 | interest in, never zero, but minimal interest.
00:00:17.680 | And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself
00:00:23.600 | and just telling myself, "Okay, I'm super interested in reading this and I'm going to
00:00:27.200 | force myself to be interested in reading it."
00:00:30.080 | Lo and behold, I would start falling in love with certain things.
00:00:33.120 | Maybe it was even the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize.
00:00:38.800 | And then I would go look it up and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time, so
00:00:41.840 | I filed that away.
00:00:42.840 | I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of my university
00:00:47.920 | courses that, frankly, made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy, which if you ever
00:00:54.220 | try and study for that at the end, it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory
00:00:58.800 | and context.
00:00:59.800 | So, I could find little hooks and through those hooks, I could kind of ratchet my way
00:01:04.920 | into a larger interest.
00:01:06.200 | And then, lo and behold, I'm really interested in Greek mythology, or I actually liked that
00:01:10.920 | one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself.
00:01:13.760 | But maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation?
00:01:20.800 | Is it always reflexive?
00:01:23.400 | Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic or scenario or a group
00:01:30.880 | of people?
00:01:32.600 | And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance, because there's a rich
00:01:35.860 | literature on this, as I recall, and I remember, you know, the Stanford study of rewarding
00:01:39.440 | kids for things they were already intrinsically motivated to do, maybe we could touch on that
00:01:42.720 | a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it.
00:01:44.880 | But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things
00:01:49.600 | that initially we don't feel that excited to do, and yet succeeding in life, you know,
00:01:55.000 | until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopefully by
00:02:00.400 | now you have.
00:02:01.400 | To find a way to get it done.
00:02:03.280 | Right.
00:02:04.280 | This is fundamental to being a functional human being, frankly.
00:02:07.600 | Not just successful in air quotes, but functional.
00:02:11.360 | We got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing.
00:02:13.400 | Yeah.
00:02:14.400 | So, I think we can talk about a couple of different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation.
00:02:18.080 | We can think about how the task itself is designed, we can think about reward systems,
00:02:22.040 | and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others, which I hope
00:02:25.960 | are not lies, but rather persuasive attempts.
00:02:31.680 | Let's start on that one, actually.
00:02:32.680 | I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception.
00:02:36.280 | Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal-motivated pursuits.
00:02:43.920 | But at that time for me also it was survival.
00:02:45.760 | As I mentioned, I didn't do well in high school.
00:02:47.920 | I really wanted to perform well in university.
00:02:50.640 | But I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me.
00:02:55.560 | It felt catabolic.
00:02:58.560 | And I don't know, maybe at that age I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity.
00:03:03.980 | We know it never closes.
00:03:06.800 | But I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described.
00:03:11.480 | Yeah.
00:03:12.480 | So, I think for most people the best method of self-persuasion is actually to convince
00:03:16.120 | somebody else.
00:03:17.120 | So, I'm thinking of Eliot Aronson's classic research on cognitive dissonance, where he
00:03:22.160 | would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting.
00:03:28.220 | And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification.
00:03:32.520 | Like, I got 20 bucks to kind of fib a little bit about this task.
00:03:38.360 | You know, the task is bad, but I did it for the payment.
00:03:42.120 | When he paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't, you
00:03:46.720 | ended up liking it more.
00:03:48.400 | Wow.
00:03:49.400 | And maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised.
00:03:54.560 | Because I hope people got what you just said very clearly.
00:03:57.520 | If they didn't – if you don't like doing something, going and reporting to somebody
00:04:01.280 | else how great that thing is, so lying about it to somebody else, is one way to increase
00:04:08.000 | the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic.
00:04:12.880 | And if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody in the positive direction, so against your
00:04:18.880 | true belief, it's less effective in shifting your underlying affect about that thing, your
00:04:24.440 | emotions, than if you're paid less.
00:04:25.760 | Correct?
00:04:26.760 | Yeah, exactly.
00:04:27.760 | Now, I think obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect.
00:04:32.080 | But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right, I've
00:04:36.280 | got to find something about this task that's interesting to me.
00:04:39.680 | And then in the process of explaining it to somebody else, I'm going to convince myself
00:04:43.440 | because I'm hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust.
00:04:47.640 | I've also chosen – I've chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing
00:04:53.800 | somebody else's reasons.
00:04:55.680 | And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if you're trying
00:05:00.800 | to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, okay, what is it
00:05:05.520 | that would make this fascinating to me?
00:05:08.080 | And in a lot of cases, what you're looking for is a curiosity gap.
00:05:11.520 | I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch.
00:05:16.920 | So there's something you want to know, and you don't know it yet.
00:05:19.880 | So I would say – I tell my students often, like, take your least favorite class and find
00:05:25.000 | a mystery or a puzzle, like, something that you just do not know the answer to.
00:05:29.520 | Like, I actually have talked with our kids about this, like, what really happened to
00:05:33.480 | King Tut?
00:05:34.480 | Do you know?
00:05:35.480 | Can you get to the bottom of that?
00:05:37.280 | And all of a sudden, you're like, "I wonder.
00:05:38.280 | I need to Google it, and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this."
00:05:43.080 | And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes.
00:05:45.440 | And I think that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation.
00:05:49.400 | Aaron Powell I see.
00:05:50.600 | So inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits
00:05:58.760 | and therefore psychology that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking
00:06:06.800 | information where – well, and I should say, I define curiosity – and hopefully, you'll
00:06:11.720 | disagree with me or agree either way.
00:06:13.320 | It doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding.
00:06:15.880 | I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular
00:06:21.400 | outcome.
00:06:22.400 | Yes.
00:06:23.400 | Is that right?
00:06:24.400 | Yeah.
00:06:25.400 | In psychology, it's typically defined as just wanting to know.
00:06:27.760 | And that means you're driven by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly
00:06:31.200 | what you're driving at.
00:06:32.200 | Aaron Powell Okay, great.
00:06:33.200 | And I think it was Dorothy Parker that said, "The cure for boredom is curiosity.
00:06:38.320 | There is no cure for curiosity."
00:06:39.760 | Kevin Vallier As there shouldn't be a cure for curiosity.
00:06:42.320 | Aaron Powell Right.
00:06:43.320 | So – and by the way, folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in
00:06:48.680 | the brain.
00:06:49.680 | It's got to be a distributed network.
00:06:50.680 | There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward
00:06:54.160 | systems of dopamine, et cetera, in some way because when one discovers something new that
00:06:59.120 | satisfies some curiosity, it's clearly there's an internal reward there.
00:07:04.880 | Okay, let me back up.
00:07:06.040 | So if your child or an adult is dreading working, exploring a topic or going about an assignment
00:07:16.120 | of any kind, you will give them a question that they then need to resolve.
00:07:21.080 | What if the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn?
00:07:25.280 | Do you say, you know, count the leaves or – I mean, how does one get past the sort
00:07:31.400 | of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where
00:07:38.040 | it's unlikely that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful
00:07:41.780 | for the – for future?
00:07:42.780 | Kevin Vallier You always start with, okay, what's the first
00:07:45.780 | experiment I can run?
00:07:46.940 | Find the most interesting looking leaf or your favorite leaf, and then that lasts for
00:07:50.000 | about two minutes.
00:07:51.000 | And okay, now what?
00:07:52.000 | We still have a lot of leaves there.
00:07:53.000 | Aaron Powell Right.
00:07:54.000 | So I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone.
00:07:57.400 | And so when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find, what you want to substitute with
00:08:00.840 | is a sense of purpose.
00:08:03.560 | Maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you, you need
00:08:07.640 | to find a meaningful outcome.
00:08:09.600 | So there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose
00:08:17.320 | for learning – this goes through high school – and think, you know, this is not just
00:08:21.660 | interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people
00:08:26.000 | one day.
00:08:27.000 | They're more persistent in their studying, they end up getting better grades.
00:08:30.840 | And so I think intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how.
00:08:35.760 | A sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why.
00:08:38.640 | Why does this matter?
00:08:40.040 | And so I'd say with the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something else
00:08:44.720 | that you care about.
00:08:46.360 | Are you going to pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home?
00:08:51.080 | Are you going to have a place to play soccer that you didn't before?
00:08:57.240 | And I think then the process of getting to that – I guess what I'd say is if you're
00:09:03.000 | trying to motivate yourself, it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate
00:09:07.400 | somebody else on this.
00:09:08.400 | If I was going to motivate somebody else, I would take a page out of the motivational
00:09:11.880 | interviewing playbook where I would say, okay, Andrew, actually, let's play this out for
00:09:15.240 | a second.
00:09:16.240 | So you're going to rake a pile of leaves.
00:09:17.240 | It's a two-hour task.
00:09:18.240 | Zero to ten, how excited are you about that?
00:09:21.180 | A three.
00:09:22.180 | Three?
00:09:23.180 | Really?
00:09:24.180 | Mm-hmm.
00:09:25.180 | I'm surprised.
00:09:26.180 | I thought you were going to say zero or one.
00:09:27.180 | Mm-hmm.
00:09:28.180 | Why is it not lower?
00:09:29.180 | I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving
00:09:33.520 | my body.
00:09:34.520 | There we go.
00:09:35.520 | Okay.
00:09:36.520 | So you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.
00:09:40.360 | And I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task.
00:09:43.840 | I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it.
00:09:48.480 | And as you start to articulate it, boom, self-persuasion kicks in.
00:09:51.120 | Love it.
00:09:52.120 | I'm going to start using these approaches.
00:09:55.720 | Try it at your own risk.
00:09:58.960 | I have a question about extrinsic motivation.
00:10:03.920 | So if we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things, you know, you'll get your allowance
00:10:12.720 | if you blank.
00:10:15.700 | You can spend the money that you make on your paper route doing the things you really want
00:10:20.840 | to do.
00:10:22.840 | Is there any value in those kinds of learning-based incentives for kids and for adults?
00:10:29.020 | Because I mean, that's the real world as well.
00:10:30.960 | I know plenty of people.
00:10:31.960 | I have family members that only work for a paycheck and they're pretty okay because they
00:10:37.560 | like spending their paycheck.
00:10:39.080 | I mean, I'm not intrinsically attached to money.
00:10:41.960 | I mean, I certainly have needs in life, but I don't enjoy spending money for the sake
00:10:47.160 | of spending it or for gaining more possessions.
00:10:49.920 | But I know people that do, and I certainly don't judge.
00:10:53.420 | Are they somehow existing in a diminished landscape of happiness?
00:10:59.760 | Because they seem pretty happy to me.
00:11:01.900 | But they seem to have also worked out this relationship.
00:11:04.000 | They do certain things to get the extrinsic rewards, and they really enjoy what they can
00:11:08.320 | do with those extrinsic rewards.
00:11:11.400 | So there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation
00:11:16.760 | and performance.
00:11:18.360 | And I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the latest meta-analyses, so a huge
00:11:22.420 | study of studies trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive
00:11:27.200 | to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and
00:11:32.360 | now we're going to give you incentive compensation.
00:11:35.320 | There is a boost.
00:11:36.320 | So in general, people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output.
00:11:43.640 | But these incentives are better for motivating quantity than quality.
00:11:48.000 | So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough.
00:11:52.360 | Are they less careful and less thorough?
00:11:54.880 | No.
00:11:55.880 | Actually, there's still positive effects on average.
00:11:57.640 | They're just weaker.
00:11:58.640 | And of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize being fast and
00:12:02.760 | careful?
00:12:05.360 | But I think where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect
00:12:11.440 | of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation.
00:12:13.440 | And you were alluding to this earlier, dating back to the early '70s, where we know that
00:12:17.280 | if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it, you might conclude that you're
00:12:21.160 | only doing it for the outcome and you lose interest in the task.
00:12:23.800 | So the classic demonstration, Mark Lepper and colleagues, is kids playing video games.
00:12:28.880 | And they're playing them because they're fun.
00:12:31.360 | And then you start to add in an incentive.
00:12:34.520 | And then when the incentive's taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the
00:12:38.080 | meaning of the task has changed.
00:12:39.680 | And now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it, as opposed to I love
00:12:42.160 | the process.
00:12:43.880 | I think that that phenomenon does not have to exist.
00:12:49.000 | So we know, for example, at work, if managers, as long as they give people autonomy, they
00:12:54.520 | don't present the rewards in a controlling way.
00:12:57.440 | So instead of saying, Andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following work.
00:13:03.160 | If they say, hey, look, I'd really love it if you would deliver the following.
00:13:08.760 | And in order to make that worth your while, I'm offering this incentive.
00:13:12.700 | People react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control.
00:13:16.800 | So I think that that's, I guess, the starting point.
00:13:19.440 | In the presence of autonomy, I don't think there's a major downside of extrinsic rewards.
00:13:24.640 | I think you also have to be careful that, yeah, I guess that you're not over-justifying
00:13:29.840 | the task.
00:13:30.840 | In other words, you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it, but you're
00:13:36.240 | adding a reason to try it.
00:13:37.520 | So actually, if we go to a different domain for a second.
00:13:41.880 | So look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables.
00:13:45.980 | Extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time.
00:13:50.920 | But then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind, and
00:13:55.080 | then they find reasons to keep doing it.
00:13:59.320 | And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work.
00:14:02.320 | I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's
00:14:07.440 | behavior.
00:14:08.440 | I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior.
00:14:12.560 | If you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, "Yeah, you know what?
00:14:17.320 | That reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for that reward."
00:14:22.920 | Yeah.
00:14:23.920 | You basically answered the question I was going to ask, which is, and at risk of sounding
00:14:27.760 | new agey, but we are sitting in California, I could imagine that when one is focused on
00:14:35.120 | the extrinsic rewards, so a physical task or a cognitive task for an extrinsic reward,
00:14:41.800 | if I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward, I'm also, air quotes again, "not present," right?
00:14:47.800 | I'm thinking about the outcome.
00:14:49.680 | I'm not thinking about process.
00:14:52.040 | And I think there's, and perhaps you can flesh out some of what this is exactly, but I think
00:14:56.360 | there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally
00:15:02.520 | present to the task, that we're going to perform better.
00:15:04.760 | And presumably our intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as
00:15:11.000 | well.
00:15:12.000 | Is that true?
00:15:13.000 | Yeah, I think so.
00:15:14.000 | I think, so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for
00:15:16.760 | performance, one you touched on earlier, it's focus of attention.
00:15:21.460 | It's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated.
00:15:23.760 | You get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away.
00:15:27.560 | So you mentioned sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time.
00:15:32.540 | You forget where you are.
00:15:33.540 | Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just merged into the task.
00:15:38.440 | And so that concentration is helpful.
00:15:41.320 | There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're
00:15:45.200 | less likely to give up in the face of obstacles.
00:15:47.720 | You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with
00:15:50.760 | great ideas.
00:15:51.760 | And so, you know, I think there's a working harder, there's a working longer, there's
00:15:55.840 | a working smarter, and there's also a thinking more clearly effect.
00:16:00.160 | [Music]